Outdated SEO Concepts People Still Think are&nbspReality

The author's views are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.

It's on the internet, so it's true.

The bane of the existence of all search marketers is old or incorrect information given to clients at
any point in time that they still hang on to. This post was inspired by an interaction with a client's co-workers, people that are not thinking about SEO on a regular basis. This is not to knock them, but to bring to the attention of everyone that there is a continual need for education. These concepts have a way of hanging around.

And this isn't about just clients either. This is about friends, parents, and partners. Does anyone else still get asked if they make pop-up ads when they try to explain what they do? (Just me? Crap.)

Doing research for this post, I noticed there are a ton of SEO misconceptions out there, and people are talking about them regularly, but many are related to content marketing or online marketing overall. I'm not covering all misconceptions, but those concepts that seem to be stuck to the idea of SEO and will not let go. Then I'll give you resources to help educate the people that believe these misconceptions and alternate solutions to give them.

Putting text behind an image

The inspiration. The client is struggling with balancing revenue and content on the page. There is a large image on the page now and we suggested editing the page to add content about the product. The question was asked if we could just put the content behind the image and solve both problems.

My client stepped in and answered the question wonderfully, but it brought to mind how many times I've seen overstuffed alt text attributes and content in a noscript tag that doesn't match what's in the Flash.

Additional resource

Alternate solution

In this instance, we recommended putting text below the fold for the users that wanted the information and keeping the current image for returning users. Balance that satisfies both user needs and the business goals.

Copying a competitor's actions

This isn't as obvious as hiding text, but it's something that companies refuse to stop doing. It's the concept that if a competitor is doing something, it must be worth doing. This goes for competitors ranking above a business, but it also covers competitors that the business just dislikes. We all have those competitors we want to "beat" and sometimes that makes us do things that are not fully researched and planned.

Amazon.com is my biggest annoyance. I can't count how many times I've heard the reasoning "but Amazon does it" by major brands that other businesses look up to. Amazon, like most major companies, tests many things, and there is a different person behind each test. If you work for a large company, you understand what I mean.

Additional resource

Alternate solution

Everyone is on the hunt for the best results and bringing in new customers, retaining current customers, and making other stakeholders happy. The way you beat competitors is to listen to your stakeholders (customers, clients, partners, employees, investors) and make decisions based on their feedback as well as what is going on in the market.

Sheer number of links equals ranking

This has been debunked so many times it makes my head swim. That doesn't change how many people still think that the total number of links (as reported by a third party tool like Moz, Majestic, or AHREFs) is the sole factor in ranking. Want to do better in SERPs? Well, we need to hire someone to build us some links! I'm going to leave one screen shot here (Search: "insurance") and then we'll get into resources and solutions for when you have to face this.

Additional resource

Alternate solution

This is more of an "additional solution," as links and mentions are still very important, but as seen above, it's far from the only factor in ranking. It's best to explain the different ranking factors like content relevance to the query, some social data, query deserves freshness, local, news, personalization, and all of the other things that can impact ranking. Focus on a marketing strategy that will not only result in links, but also send new customers through those links and engage the customers into lifelong evangelists.

A loss in traffic means you've been penalized

The next two are focused on the issue of penalties. So many people are afraid of being penalized. I think this goes back to the days of black marks in your school record. That or people are worried about losing revenue. Maybe that.

The media gets involved with SEO when there is a penalty and so that is what most people hear about. FTD and Overstock types of situations. Then disaster strikes and revenue falls unexpectedly. After some digging, they find that website traffic is down. This paired with emails business owners get at least once a quarter (in a good year) from fly by night SEO companies telling them they can help with SEO, promise the moon and warn of penalties.

The only logical conclusion is a penalty! We have all seen it and most reputable agencies pipelines are filled with leads from companies in this exact situation. The thing is that we never know if there is a penalty unless we dive into the situation, but I have seen times where there is no penalty.

Many things could have happened including:

A developer added a noindex tag to a section of the site when meaning to add it to one page or they disallowed that section.

The site was redesigned with URL changes that can drop the traffic coming into many sites if not done correctly.

PPC traffic stopped due to a corporate card expiring and not being updated.

Additional resource

Alternate solution

Rather than paying the first person that will call you back, first look into what part of the site lost traffic and where that traffic was coming from in the past few months. Did you lose traffic from organic search, paid search, referral traffic, or social media? Try to narrow down what happened and figure it out from there. If you're sure it was organic search, look into the date and ask your developers if anything changed about the site. If nothing did, check Google Webmaster Tools for any messages from Google about a penalty. If you're sure it's organic search and there are no messages, that's a good time to contact a reputable agency.

Duplicate content can incur a penalty

I did a talk on this very topic a few years back at Pubcon. So many people don't take the time to understand what duplicate content is and how to fix it. More importantly, there is a misunderstanding that duplicate content can cause or is a penalty.

Most clients assume that having duplicate content will incur the "search engine gods' " wrath, and that just isn't true (for the most part; I mean, if your whole site is a copy of someone else's site ...). Duplicate content is a hindrance to site performance most of the time, but most likely not the cause for a substantial drop in traffic and definitely not a penalty from the search engines.

Additional resource

Alternate solution

Don't fret. Take the time to visit Webmaster Tools regularly and check out your duplicated title tags and meta descriptions for an easy look into what might be causing duplicate content or crawling issues on your site. Maintenance is the best medicine!

A call to educate

We sometimes live in a bubble where we think people know everything we do and take for granted information like everything above. If someone asked you how to create a P&L Statement, could you? Maybe, maybe not, but you get what I mean. Take the time to answer questions, whether from clients or colleagues if you are in-house. You would be amazed how much more YOU can learn from teaching others.

So what are your horror stories? Let me know in the comments below!

Photo credits (all images are linked):

Internet Open by Blaise Alleyne

Hiding Cat by Aftab Uzzaman

Penalty by Daniele Zanni

Educate by Sean MacEntee

About katemorris —

Kate Morris is the Director of SEO for Bluprint, an NBCUniversal company. She loves to teach through regular posting and speaking and has been in the industry for over 15 years.

This is an excellent list of myths that persist in the SEO world by word of mouth. Thank you!

However, your duplicate content comments could be expanded a bit. Duplicate content doesn't cause a penalty, but it can prevent your site from ranking well. Some of the examples I've dealt with are doctors' websites where the content is provided by a medical-specialty web developer, and a cardiologist's website in Tucson looks almost exactly like the cardiologist's site in Cleveland. It's expensive to develop unique, specialized content for sites like this, and it's a tough sell to get the doctor client to believe that new content development is needed to move the site from the middle of the second page of results to the top section of the first page.

This was perfect. I've ran into this exact issue again and again with medical clients.

What people need to understand with duplicate content is that they're not being penalized for having identical content. If Google sees multiple sites with duplicate content, it just picks one page to display and hides the rest. The danger in duplicate content comes from being hidden.

Thank you for clarifying that point for readers Paul. We work with a lot of dealer network and other multi-location sites for visibility and can absolutely confirm that the sites may be indexed, but if they are duplicates likely perform poorly. In one test we de-duped 235 dealer sites, resulting in 78% almost immediately (natural re-crawl) going from not in top 100 results to page 1. Same CMS (alpha MarketSnare), same everything except the body copy was de-duped.

Side note, I've talked to both Matt Cutts and John Mueller about Google testing user acceptance (quality) of duplicate content, where a local intent (query) is present, as our research shows that someone in X market doesn't care that content is duplicated in Y market, if it solves their problem or answers their questions. Both appeared to see merit in that idea and mentioned "looking into it." (Shrug)

Duplicate content does affect site performance, but it is not a penalty that can be lifted. That was my exact point. It is an issue, but is typically not something that just "happens" out of the blue one day with no changes to the site. The site performance issues stemming from duplicate content are always technical in nature and can be fixed but are not a penalty.

When I read the Google article linked from your post it said this "...In the rare cases in which Google perceives that duplicate content may be shown with intent to manipulate our rankings and deceive our users, we'll also make appropriate adjustments in the indexing and ranking of the sites involved. As a result, the ranking of the site may suffer, or the site might be removed entirely from the Google index, in which case it will no longer appear in search results..." (in bold, it's pretty clear to me that they are saying duplicate content gets penalized).

As I said in my post "for the most part; I mean, if your whole site is a copy of someone else's site ..." -- that's what I mean by what Google says there. If you are straight copying someone else's site or trying to be deceitful, that's a horse of a different color.

But duplicate content to most sites is just a few hundred pages and it happens on accident. Those pages will not rank well, but they are not causing a penalty. Violating Google's TOS will get you a manual penalty, but standard duplicate content will not.

First thanks for the article, well done. I know I'm nitpicking here but isn't a page not ranking well a penalty? Maybe the SEs aren't manually inflicting a penalty but if my pages aren't showing up in the SERPs, that is a problem.

I don't see it as a penalty. A penalty is a manual action in which a team member from Google's Webspam team either removes pages from the indexed or drops them substantially in ranking. Usually it's the first option. A page not ranking well is the result of a few things: relevance, competition, and strength (site and page) being a few. They are two different things. They are both problems, but there is a big distinction and the action items on both are totally separate.

There are many myths around us in our SEO industry, one of them which I come across on regular basis is some people think 'User Experience' doesn't matter, where it should be taken care of very wisely.

I had a similar discussion with Cyrus Shepard over this topic few days back and he suggested - "Google can measure how users react to that page. If it presents a bad user experience, I have no doubt it will drop in rankings."

I think the quote about Google being able to "measure Bad Experience" and de-rank it is the big take away from your comment. If we look in the mirror honestly and see our content not being great for the content consumer then we have a better chance of improvement.

"I can't count how many times I've heard the reasoning "but Amazon does it" by major brands that other businesses look up to"

I had a client that sold enterprise software, so they were always comparing themselves to SAP and Oracle. It didn't matter what we did or our good the results were, they could never compare to what SAP and Oracle was getting and therefore their SEO was a complete failure. Yes, you need to know how you stack up to your competitors, but at the same time you don't have to or want to be just like them.

Exactly! And there are things companies like Amazon could be doing better but aren't because they are so successful. There is always room for improvement and finding what works well for your company could be a better solution than Amazon's (or at least better for you!).

Its like: never change a winning Team. Or if something isn't broken, don't fix it.

If you have pretty well ranking sites, you start to think twice about changing something. I think twice about changings on some sites. No matter that I know from other sites, that it could help and wont hurt :)

I think one way the internet gets saturated with out of date content is from copywriters working for SEO and Marketing companies. They often do a quick Google search to get an idea, then regurgitate old information as industry advice.

I try to educate my team and clients to follow influencers instead of stumbling across blogs offering the latest tips from random bloggers.

"They often do a quick Google search to get an idea, then regurgitate old information as industry advice." This happened to me at lot the first six months I started SEO. I would read something like "Like Wheels Are Awesome," then I'd ask a queston about it on MOZ q/a...then wait for the inevitable facepalms to echo through the web.

Fortunately, I had this community to help me, because it could have gotten really bad!

To add to the discussion on building links, I completely agree that too many people are concerned about the number of links they get and not the quality of the link. I would much rather have one link from a well known site in my clients industry with high DA and high PA, than 100 links from random directories and websites that have nothing to do with their industry. Why? I'm not going to get into specifics about the impact on SERPs, but I guarantee you that your website will bring in more "relevant" traffic from that one link than all of those other links combined.

Also, link building today has become more of a PR & Outreach initiative. Create awesome content, outreach it, and if it's good enough then people will share it and "naturally" give you links. For instance, you could have built the most amazing gadget in the world that will result in world peace, but if you don't tell anyone about it (PR & Outreach) then how will anyone ever know about it (Likes, +'s, retweets, links, etc.)?

I haven't shared any thing irrelevant here. These are just my views which I shared few days back on a similar topic. That's all. MOZ team is free to remove that link if they feel it's a spam or irrelevant link.

And yes, you are free to not to visit that page if you think its a bad act of mine. I am glad you noticed it.

Hi there! Praveen is right; the link he included is editorial in nature and relevant to the post/his comment. No problem at all. Also, if you'd like to reply to his comment, please do so by clicking "Reply" instead of by creating an entirely new comment -- that way they don't separate like these did.

I have to agree the link from Praveen is very relevant in its content. I think it ads to the post and gives readers an even greater list than that was just originally posted by Kate. Both articles are really good.

Had a great time reading it. Thanks for sharing the post. Today, with the introduction of several google algorithms, everyone is a bit confused about what to do and what not to do. And blogs like this actually helps a lot!!

Educate! I am going to be pointing people in the direction of this article.

Love the part about copying competitors. Among other reasons, you can't just look at a competitor's links and assume you should match them - you never know which ones they have had to disavow due to Penguin or some other reason.

Traffic loss does not equal a penalty is a personal favorite, too. Almost every day I get a request for penalty help where they site has only dropped a few spots, or has something else wrong with it. Penalties are actually very rare - maybe too rare even.

One missing misconception: "Paying for Adwords helps you rank better in organic". Why do people still believe that?

Thank you. This is helpful as a new initiate to the field. I have heard advice and instructions from experts all over the web, and it is nice to find some material which cuts through the fat in what is out there on SEO.

You could write a large book about all the concepts like these still floating around. My favorite remains the idea that the more clicks to your site the higher the ranking. So company gets employees/kids/anybody to continually click on serps all day long, bouncing back and forth. Have heard the same concept for clicks on adwords, it helps raise your organic ranking so same practice with predictable results.... come to think of it maybe this is one that google doesn't mind keeping in circulation :P

Great post! I agree with you that we shouldn't be doing things "just because" a competitor is doing them, but think that section could be clarified a little because it is very valuable to know what your competitors are doing.

Major brands understandably look up to Amazon and while they should not try to just copy everything that Amazon is doing, they can use it as a valuable research tool, especially if they are an ecommerce brand and their products or similar products are being sold on Amazon. For example, review a products Q & A section. These are questions asked and answered by actual consumers of that product. This information is SO valuable when you are developing your own product content. Same with reviews left on Amazon - sure your website is not likely to come close to the number of reviews that Amazon gets for their products - but by reading the reviews you can see what consumers actually care about and cater your website content to that.

Again I think you had a great post and really enjoyed it! I just hope that everyone who reads it understands the difference in blindly copying competitors vs doing competitor research for powerful insight and SEO opportunities.

I love that you get the question if you make pop-up ads because I am a digital marketing student and people always question what kind of jobs you can get with a digital marketing degree. I usually say SEO, marketing research, etc... and no one ever knows what SEO is usually until I break it down. Anyways great blog it was very insightful and an easy read for beginners such as myself.

Duplicate content as a penalty is one of the misconceptions I hear the most - although a loss in rankings either by penalty or by duplicate content being a hindrance amounts for a similar thing in the clients eyes! However, if it is duplicate content it is easier and quicker to solve than a penalty and this needs to be articulated to the client.

Educating the client is a key component of gaining their trust/buy in and avoiding accusations based on facts that they heard years ago and still believe are true. I completely agree with you in that it is incredibly frustrating when people hang on to bits of information (with no research on their part) which they might have hear in passing.

I'm glad you added duplicate content and penalty concerns to this list. I know, for myself, that was one of the hardest concepts for me - as a SEO professional - to grasp and fully understand, so it's not surprising there's still issues with understanding it today.

Panda's bigger than just duplicate content, and getting others to understand the bigger picture behind what the search engines are looking for is difficult. I was also pleasantly surprised not to see anything about PR links (i.e. "PR6 and up links get you rankings," etc.), perhaps that's too outdated an SEO concept!

Kate, these are simple and great tips for SEO. Thanks for sharing! It still amazes me how often from clients and others in my network I hear stories about black hat efforts, black listings and lost opportunities, yet people still don't get the fact that SEO is NOT a quick fix. They want to show up today and they continue to believe that adding some meta tags will do the trick.

My response has always been to slow down and focus on two things: good quality content on a consistent basis and website health (both mentioned above). If a company were to simply just focus on those two things and give it time to work, they are certainly not going to be hurting in the search engines. It doesn't necessarily take a programmer, just patience. Thanks for giving me a good tool to share!

Part of what fuels outdated SEO practices is Panda & Penguin haven't been fully implemented on Google.co.in and most other Google sites internationally.

I recently had a client (Indian based site, hosted on an Indian IP and domain) and coincidentally it had an extremely over-optimized link profile and massive thin/duplicate content yet they were ranking for a number of top tier keywords and had no manual or algorithmic penalties.

Nothing against our off-shore friends in India but just understand this: Google is still the 2005-2008 version in other parts of the world.

Bravo Kate! The last sentence is the key, learn when teaching others. My own tests and my own clients teach me more than a lot of "gurus" saying what I have to do. The SEO changes every month, and new tests have to be made every month if you want. Great content Kate, thanks.

Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is something many businesses try to achieve while improving their internet reach. However, as Kate Morris pointed out in her experience, there are numerous myths in SEO that must be settled once for all. For example, it is a myth that putting text behind an image actually works, whereas below the fold does in reality work better. Copying the actions of a competitor is a another fallacy in SEO that occurs. Another issue that people assume is that the number of links is the biggest factor for rankings, even though there are other real factors that people ignore. Finally, it seems that people assume that a loss in ranking means a penalty, which is ignoring the other issues. Morris discovered that companies need to look past these outdated SEO myths and that they need to focus on a real strategy that works for them.

I don't know if I agree with not copying your competitors. I would argue that when you have a new website and you don't know where to start, many SEO people will go straight to the top and see what everyone else is doing. Granted, we aren't just looking at link profiles anymore, we are looking for coherent theories and strategies.

Seeing what everyone else is doing is not my point. I agree and have said in the article and in comments that competitive research is very necessary. Most people here assume I mean link building and that is still a problem (not all links are good and the good ones probably can't be replicated), but the main issue is in strategies and theories. Copying what a competitor is doing just because they are doing it and assuming that it works for them is a fallacy. Just because a competitor outranks you for a handful of terms doesn't mean that one tactic is working for them. If it is, it doesn't mean it'll work for you. I'm advocating taking time to test and question if specific strategies, tactics and other things are best for your situation, not just blindly doing something because a competitor did.

Hi Kate, you say: "Duplicate content is ... definitely not a penalty from the search engines". This is true for duplicate content on the same site, but when it happens across multiple sites, penalties can be triggered. Websites suffering from excessive duplicate or near duplicate content can suffer from algorithmic 'penalties' which can hurt their rankings.

I too have found that duplicate content can be a difficult subject to explain. I personally think that people misuse the "penalized" word when the word "devalued" should have been used. According to Google, copied content takes little time, effort or expertise. by duplicating content from other pages you are not getting the full value of your content. I fully agree that duplicate content is a hindrance to performance from a site value perspective and is rarely seen as a penalty.

I agree with the intent of every item you wrote here...but if you are copying what a competitor is doing in terms of the really strong link profile that they have, it's not necessarily a bad thing. Just sayin' : ) Great post and it's important to dispel as many "myths" as possible for the sake of the industry!

You and Ryan bring up similar points, competitive research is still very necessary, it's doing something without testing it ... or never looking at the results for your company I am against.

Researching a competitor and using what they have done that is high quality for inspiration is always necessary. Typically though, the best links and mentions are not that easy. You can't "go get the same link," but those good links can inspire writers you want to reach out to, sites to participate in, etc.

Hi Ruth, and thanks for contributing! If you'd like to reply to a comment that's already here, please use the "Reply" link on that comment itself instead of creating an entirely new comment. That way they won't be separated like this one is.

"Duplicate content is a hindrance to site performance most of the time, but most likely not the cause for a substantial drop in traffic and definitely not a penalty from the search engines. "

There is the well known case of solosails dot com on Google Product forums wherein one fine day the websites ranking disappears. There was a catastrophic disappearance in search rankings and organic traffic.

The website had not been penalized in any way.

It was later found that the tag and category urls were indexed and they were in fact constituting duplicate content Once these urls were noindexed the ranking magically reappeared and traffic went up to what it was before the drop. Here is the url of the discussion:

Hey Kate...Matt Stelter (logged in under Mr. Douma's account, I see) Great to hear from you! I really like your point about not copying a competitor's actions. That is such an easy trap for marketers to fall into, particularly when they perceive the competitor to be "winning." I've also seen many marketing consultants recommend a "benchmark & imitate" strategy as a path to success. The grass often appears to be greener on the other side, but as you say, there is no guarantee that they have any clue what they are doing.

"Most clients assume that having duplicate content will incur the "search engine gods' " wrath, and that just isn't true (for the most part; I mean, if your whole site is a copy of someone else's site ...). Duplicate content is a hindrance to site performance most of the time, but most likely not the cause for a substantial drop in traffic and definitely not a penalty from the search engines. "

~This isn't true.

I have clients that do this to themselves REGULARLY. Duplicate content WILL CAUSE a substantial drop in your site impressions & traffic. Just ask Marriott (not that they know they have this issue -- but they do). I'll even give you a more specific example. Search for "hotel *city*" and pick your market. You'll find 1 result in the top 100 for Marriott . com - while other domains see multiple spots in the top 100. This is due to Panda and Marriott not knowing what they've done to themselves.

Duplicate content is a SERIOUS issue that WILL hurt your site traffic.

My point is that it isn't a penalty incurred from the search engines. I did not say it wasn't a problem or doesn't hurt your site. Duplicate content is a technical optimization issue. Your site will not be deindexed for duplicate content. It will perform less than optimally and is a major issue, actually the #1 issue I come across. But it is not a penalty.

Interest topic Kate, This is what people like to read and want to follow.. I appreciate that you clear the most important point of following the competitors link building strategies what they do and its impact..

Most of internet marketers are confused that Google panda hit duplicate content or something else.. Here i clear that Google panda hit and lower the rank of low-quality sites or thin sites and return higher-quality sites near the top of the search results.

Thank you for the great post! I have a question and not sure if this tactic is outdated or considered "black hat" now.

If a local business doesn't have multiple offices but still want to rank for nearby cities for queries like "business lawyer [city name]", is it ok to set up GEO-targeted pages for those city name keywords but hide these pages from the website's navigation (coz they don't want to confuse customers of the actual location of the office)?

I know some agencies do it this way but just doesn't feel quite right. However, it seems no better way to break the tie of a website with its physical location in Google's eyes.

The issue lies in what you're really expecting. If you want to rank in local results for those city names, no. That requires having a physical location in that city. But if you want to target people using those city names in their searches, that's more possible. The issue lies in distinguishing the pages and making them WORTH ranking. If you ask in Q&A with more specifics, we can help out a little better.

DC doesn't cause penalty? Well maybe not manual but isn't this a penalty if You have great content (but copied), many good links (compared to others) and still not high enough? Google will pick the best "copy" and show it in search results. Let's say not "penalty" but "trouble getting high serps".

Cool opinion... The reasoning behind "online marketing" has totally changed too much throughout the years and recently, much more then ever, I think it's a blending of many elements (website usability, social media & content marketing, SEO, engagement strategies and marketing tools such as wp profit builder , etc).As a first time visitor to your blogs I am very impressed.thank you:)

Hi there, and welcome to Moz! We appreciate your contributing to the comments, but wanted to ask that they remain relevant to the post. This comment is about marketing in general, whereas Kate's post is specifically about certain old SEO tactics. Thanks much. =)

I enjoyed your post. I tackled outdated SEO practices from an auditing perspective a few months ago. You should check it out. I'm still shocked that there is a conspiracy out there around the mysterious "duplicate content penalty"!